Watch Out For These 5 Food and Health Trends This Year

I’m a startup CEO in the food industry with a background in medicine. One of my tasks has been to distil the food ecosystem, so our team can create a product that’s well positioned in the marketplace. In building a platform to help people make informed decisions about the food they eat, my team and I have collected meaningful data and identified trends that will affect the market structure. Here are a few predictions you should consider if you’re in the food or health industry.

The Market Structure and Bargaining Power Will Shift

For the last several decades, bargaining power has consolidated with large companies supplying farmers and grocery chains. Due to the large-scale monoculture and reliance on industrial fertilizers leading to soil degradation or over-processing of food, this consolidation has created an ecosystem where nutritious food has often been sacrificed in search of scalable economies.

We Will Need to Build a Better Information System

Drivers for changes in the market structure have largely been out of the consumer’s control until now. We believe the problem with feeding billions of people while delaying the onset of chronic disease is primarily an informational problem. It’s difficult to promote healthy eating behavior when we focus on counting calories. Hence, we end up growing, subsidizing, and distributing the wrong types of foods. Good food impacts health positively, so an ideal solution would emphasize the nutritive value of food. If we consider “counting calories” as an information system, then we need to create another system that is as easy to use but one that’s better at informing the food ecosystem of what it should grow, distribute, and consume.

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Vivek Narayan is the founder and CEO of @GorMonjee, a platform to replace calorie counting as the de-facto method of making food decisions.

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